This is Jamie Sanders. Welcome to another episode of Eating the Past, as we explore the spices and flavors that enliven our favorite dishes.
Everyone has spices they like and those they find less pleasing. Some people find raw garlic just too powerful. Others are irritated by the intense heat of too much chili pepper. But there is one ingredient used to flavor dishes that most people like, but some people really, really hate: cilantro.
I love cilantro! Growing up in the rural South, I had never really eaten it, until I travelled to Mexico. Of course, there, it is a central ingredient to so many dishes, especially added to salsas, tacos, and soups – but really to almost anything. To me, cilantro just brings a freshness to any dish, with flavors of lemon and pepper, and, for lack of a better word, it just tastes herbaceous. It’s like its cousin parsley, but even brighter and tangier.
But for somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of people, cilantro tastes horrible! It doesn’t taste bright and citrusy at all, but instead, for these unlucky souls, cilantro has a distinct flavor – it tastes like soap!
Why? Well, it’s genetic. If you have the gene OR6A2 you will taste cilantro as soap. OR6A2 lies within a cluster of olfactory-receptor genes, which shape our sense of smell, and encodes a receptor that is highly sensitive to aldehyde chemicals – the same chemicals that give cilantro its characteristic odor. So, if you don’t like cilantro, it is not the sign of an unsophisticated palate – you just have a genetic predisposition!
But the ubiquity of cilantro in cuisines shows that genetics are not all of the story. Surveys show that about 21% of East Asians, 17% of Europeans, and 14% of people of African descent expressed a strong aversion to cilantro, but among the groups where cilantro is popular in their cuisines, only 7% of South Asians, 4% of Latinos, and 3% of Middle Eastern peoples reported a distaste for the herb. It is a bit of a chicken and egg scenario – is cilantro more common in cuisines in regions where the determining gene is rarer or maybe if you are from a culture where cilantro is in just about every dish, you’ve come to accept the taste of soap.
Perhaps the most famous person with the anti-cilantro gene was Julia Child. Child, when asked if she would ever eat cilantro, declared “Never. I would pick it out if I saw it and throw it on the floor.” But there is someone close to me who also hates cilantro – my own daughter. She wasn’t a particularly picky eater growing up, and I early on decided I was not going to be one of those parents who cooked separate meals for my kid than what the adults were eating. But I did notice her picking around anything with cilantro.
At first I thought she was just being fussy, but then I asked her to taste a leaf and describe it – her faced bunched up in a grimace. Yes – soap. But how is that possible? Her mother and I love cilantro. No, she is not illegitimate – it is all about recessive genes, and my dad hates cilantro too!
So I just made sure to add any cilantro at the table, for people to pick and choose from, if they want. And, really, this is how you should use this herb. For unlike thyme or rosemary, which can simmer with a dish and deepen their flavors, cilantro quickly loses all of its taste once heated. This is why bottled salsa can never replicate fresh!
Where does this polarizing herb come from? In spite of being so strongly associated with Mexican cuisine in the U.S, cilantro is from the Mediterranean basin. In Europe it is often called fresh coriander, which is what we call the ground up dried seeds of the herb. As with so many plants, from tomatoes to bananas to chili peppers, you can’t guess its origins from where it is used today.
Cilantro also tells us a lot about the globalization of U.S. food cultures. Living in Texas in the 1990s, you could buy bunches of fresh cilantro at any grocery store for 50 cents or less, thanks to the demand by that state’s large Latino population. But when we moved back to Pittsburgh, suddenly cilantro was no where to be found – or you had to pay two dollars for a tiny bit of herbs enclosed in plastic.
But cilantro is not thyme or sage – I use giant handfuls to make salsa! We forget how provincial U.S. tastes used to be and how hard it was to get less common ingredients. Of course now, due to immigration and changing tastes, any respectable grocery store carries that bright green herb I love so much.
Apologies to those that, sadly, only taste soap.
Thanks for listening. You can find this and other Eating the Past episodes at UPR.org. Join us next week for more food history and culture, every Sunday at noon, right before the Splendid Table, on your UPR station.
